Adrian Tomine’s New York

Adrian Tomine, who created last week’s cover “Undeterred,” just released “New York Drawings,” a compilation of his work from The New Yorker and other places. In this intimate gallery of illustrations, sketches, comics, and covers—a selection of which appears in the slide show below—Tomine explores New York’s culture and its passing moments, asking us to reflect on the city’s quirks and tenderness. We talked to Adrian about his own experience as a native Californian who has nested in Brooklyn.

Where do you get your ideas for drawings and where do you find inspiration in the city? Is it in moments you witness, the people, a certain mood?

Most of my work—including everything from my own comics to the covers I’ve drawn for The New Yorker—is the result of taking some personal experience or observation and then fictionalizing it to a degree. I’m not one of those artists with an incredible imagination who can just make things up out of nothing, and I’m not the kind of person who would throw himself into some exciting or dangerous situation just to get material. So I tend to go about my normal, boring life, and just try to look at things a little more closely. And even though I’ve lived in New York for eight years now, I still feel like a recent transplant, and I think that’s a big influence on how I see and draw the city.

What kind of place does drawing have in your relationship to the city?

Even though I’m usually not conscious of it, I think drawing has always served a sort of therapeutic purpose in my life. There’s something about the process of translating the messy chaos of real life into a clean, simple drawing that’s always been comforting to me. My wife is getting her PhD in psychology, so she’d probably have more insight into this than I do!

But I think it’s a process that inevitably makes me feel closer to whatever it is I’m drawing, and that’s certainly true of New York. I can’t put that much work into drawing something without feeling some heightened level of connection afterwards. And this is true of anything I draw, including people, buildings, even something as unremarkable as a filthy subway entrance. I’ve drawn celebrities that I wasn’t a fan of, and then afterwards, felt like, “Aw, they’re not so bad!”

What is one of your favorite things about New York?

I love having access to so many great restaurants. I’m Japanese, but restaurants in my hometown served the most sanitized versions of California rolls. I grew up eating a lot of Japanese food at home that my parents or grandparents made. And then when I came here, I’d go into restaurants and find items on the menu that I thought no one even knew about—that I thought maybe my grandma had invented. Just the idea of a restaurant serving rice balls was totally alien to me. And I’m sure all New Yorkers just think of that as a standard item at a Japanese restaurant. But rice balls were something my mom used to pack for me in my lunch, and that I’d be sort of embarrassed to pull out of my lunchbox because everybody else was eating bologna sandwiches. So then to go into these hip restaurants and be asked, “Oh, do you want salmon or plum in that? And do you want it grilled or do you want it soft?” is amazing! Or similarly, I grew up eating those dried packets of “ochazuke” that you dump over the leftover rice and pour hot water on, and I loved it—and now, I go into a restaurant and have a freshly made version of it with good wasabi and fish broth… it’s still a little mindblowing. And it doesn’t have to be highbrow. I still get a kick out of going to Sunrise Mart and microwaving their bento boxes.

Where do you find yourself spending most of your time?

I used to justify the expenses of living here by experiencing all the amazing cultural offerings this city has: shows, exhibitions, concerts—but everything changes so much once you have a kid. Now, I sort of do those things in a hypothetical way. I look at the Goings On section of The New Yorker and take some comfort in the fact that, if I wanted to, I could be attending all these events…

Since having my daughter (she’s now three), I’ve been walking a lot more. When she was a baby, I’d put her in a stroller and take a long walk, getting to know a lot of neighborhoods and their relationship to each other. I’d see that it wasn’t that far to get from Fort Greene to Park Slope, from Park Slope to Carroll Gardens. And I think all of New York is sort of like that. You get this illusion that things are farther apart than they really are because you have to go through the trouble of going downstairs and waiting for the subway, and taking the train, and coming back up when it could’ve been a ten minute walk. There are also all kinds of stuff I wouldn’t have ever experienced if I didn’t have a kid to entertain, such as going to a puppet show or the zoo (we go to the little zoo in Prospect Park all the time).

What are some things that surprised you or struck you about the city when you moved here?

Where I grew up, there’s a much clearer line of demarcation between the areas for the wealthy people and the areas for the poorer people, as well as other distinct divisions. Of course, they exist in New York too, but there’s just not enough space to have ten miles of barren land between one another; everybody is stepping on each other’s toes all the time. How people manage that can be off-putting or intimidating to me—on the other hand, it can be surprisingly considerate and helpful. It’s odd for me to even say this, but there have been more times where I’ve seen or been involved in scenarios in New York that I could describe as heartwarming, in many ways.

This one time, my wife and I were walking home from dinner when we saw a man get suddenly attacked by a group of five or six teenagers, and it turned out to be a pretty bad physical altercation. But within minutes, before I could even start to get out my cell phone, doors of nearby buildings swung open and residents came running out of their houses. One enormous guy (who looked like he should be a bouncer at a club) had one of the kids on the ground with his foot on his chest. In other cities, people might look out from behind their curtains nervously and start calling the cops, but I sense a willingness to get involved here that I don’t see everywhere else… maybe even a positive peer pressure, as though there are so many eyes upon you that you’re almost guilted into behaving properly, which is unusual.

Do you remember when you first felt at home in the city?

I have one very vivid memory: when I used to visit New York, I would come in for vacation and visit friends, and always spend the entire time in Manhattan. But when I met my wife—I actually came out from California to go on our first date—she was living in Brooklyn, on Bergen St. near Flatbush. We took the subway there, and I just remember it being so dramatic to go from the frenetic, noisy bustle of Manhattan and to come up out of the subway and be in a neighborhood that was extremely quiet and peaceful. I was taken by how beautiful the streets were: the brownstones, all the trees that were up above. I think, in that moment, there was the first glimmer in my mind that Brooklyn could possibly be a place I’d want to live after being on the West Coast my entire life.

“Society Dictates,” The New Yorker, February 5, 2001. For a review by David Denby of the film “In the Mood for Love.”

“Road Trips,” The New Yorker, October 8, 2001. For a review by Anthony Lane of the film “Mulholland Drive.”

“Monk Business,” The New Yorker, March 22, 2004. For a “Goings on About Town” listing: a performance of the music of Thelonious Monk at Iridium.

“Missed Connection,” cover of the November 8, 2004 issue. “This was my first cover, and it’s still probably my best-known drawing. Art Editor Françoise Mouly was very involved with the early, conceptual stage of the process, offering advice, suggestions, and criticism of each sketch I submitted. After re-working and eventually abandoning at least ten different ideas, I finally came upon this one, and it was like Françoise’s work was done. She left me to draw the finished piece without any further input, and that’s the artwork that ended up on the cover. The main thing that Françoise stressed throughout the process was that the image should contain at least a kernel of a story—not necessarily a ‘gag,’ but something beyond just a pretty picture—and I think it’s that quality that made this drawing resonate with people.”

“My Ex-Barber,” The New Yorker, May 2, 2005. “This was the first comic of mine that the magazine published. It was an entirely hypothetical dialogue with my old barber in Berkeley. It actually suggests a much chummier rapport than I had with the real guy, and I’m sure that for all the years he cut my hair, he never knew what I did for a living. To my absolute surprise, I was informed that shortly after this was published, a framed copy of this page appeared on the wall of the barber shop, and remained there until the barber retired several years later.”

“International Incident,” cover of the December 26, 2005 & January 2, 2006 issue. Published as “Around the World.” “Based on some sketches I made while waiting for an extremely delayed flight at J.F.K.”

“Sneakerheads,” unpublished, March, 2005. For an article about obsessive sneaker aficionados in New York.

“Bored of Tourism,” cover of the June 11 & 18, 2007 issue. Published as “Big City Thrills.” “This image was inspired by an actual scene I noticed one day up by Rockefeller Center, but the appearance of the girl with the book was based on my wife’s sister, who, at the time, was exactly the kind of preternaturally mature, cultured teenager I was trying to depict.”

“Landscape Artist,” The New Yorker, April 16, 2007. For a review by Nancy Franklin of the ‘This American Life’ television series.

“Shelf Life,” cover of the February 25, 2008 issue. “When I submitted this idea, I knew that it was a long-shot, especially since it was intended for a book-themed issue. I remember thinking, ‘They’d never put a goofy comic strip with a cynical punch line like that on the cover of The New Yorker!’”

“Read-Handed,” cover of the June 9 & 16, 2008 issue. “I’ve been privy to quite a few interpretations of my various New Yorker covers, and this one might’ve elicited the broadest range. I got letters or emails from at least five different bookstore owners—from cities across the country—who were convinced that it was their shop I had depicted. And no, they didn’t mean it in a metaphorical or symbolic context…they were absolutely sure I had stood outside their shop and drawn it. (For the record, it was based on an apartment building and bookstore on Bergen Street, in Brooklyn.) I received some pretty heartfelt letters from struggling independent booksellers who saw the image as a stinging indictment of the ‘consumer trend’ towards online book-buying.”

“Dr. Kush,” The New Yorker, July 28, 2008. For an article by David Samuels about the medical marijuana industry in California.

“Winter Break,” cover of the February 2, 2009 issue.

“Double Feature,” cover of the August 24, 2009 issue. “At the time that I drew this, everyone I knew was going to these outdoor movie screenings near the Brooklyn Bridge, so my perception of how well this image would be understood was probably a little skewed. I remember trying to explain it to a West Coast relative, and their response was, ‘Okay, but what’s so funny about that?’ The people who organized the film series were very appreciative, and they projected my artwork on the screen the following week. They invited me to attend and maybe say a few words, but here’s the thing I couldn’t tell them: I actually hate sitting in the grass in extreme humidity, trying to watch a movie while everyone around me is eating and talking!”

“Adaptation,” cover of the February 15 & 22, 2010 issue. “Sometimes the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. For the annual ‘Eustace Tilley’ cover, The New Yorker enlisted Ivan Brunetti, Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, and myself to each draw a ‘variant’ cover for the same issue. Not only were the covers supposed to interact conceptually, but when arranged next to each other in a particular way, would subtly form one giant ‘Eustace.’ Confused? So was I, as were probably at least a few of the magazine’s readers. I was honored to be a part of this noble experiment, but, to use a musical analogy, it seemed clear that this was not the inception of a ‘supergroup,’ and the four of us swiftly resumed our ‘solo careers.’”

“Exiled,” cover of July 26, 2010. “I submitted a very rough sketch of this idea, drawing without any kind of reference, and Françoise accepted it with the caveat that New Yorker readers were sticklers for detail and we’d have to make sure the background was accurate. A fair amount of research and discussion ensued, taking into consideration everything from the directional flow of traffic to the visibility of the city skyline. I finally based the background on a view of the Kosciuszko Bridge from somewhere near Maspeth, Queens. Shortly after this cover was published, The New Yorker received a letter that read: “Your July 26, 2010 cover showing a young girl going on vacation looking out the back window not safely strapped in is the height of irresponsibility. Should there be an accident the mother will not be smiling.”